No signs of crypto winter in this tropical archipelago. From American public media,

this is Marketplace Tech. I first took off during COVID

lockdown in 2021 with a now defunct video game called Axi Infinity. It allowed

players to earn money, often more than the minimum wage, through non-fungible

tokens or NFTs. Of course, the crypto winter soon followed with the implosion of

FTX in 2022, but now crypto is back in a big way in the

island nation.

Reporter Eli Tan recently visited and wrote about the scene for the New York Times.

I went to, you know, internet cafes that had popped up around Manila where people was packed

every night with people coming in to play these games as their full-time income.

You know, I visited farms where real-life farmers were on their phones

harvesting virtual crops to earn money that they were using to expand their farms.

I talked to people who were, you know, they're

their OFW, so they're overseas Filipino workers,

and they were basically making enough money

through crypto to return home to the Philippines to their families and they

call themselves overseas metaverse workers now.

So yeah, it was kind of a crazy thing to witness.

Yeah, explain a little bit more about people farming

cryptocurrency in these Metiverse games this is this is kind of the the primary way

it's come back. Yeah so there's this one game called pixels which is

really popular which is a farming game which is kind of replaced Axi infinity

...